-
Not Synced
Can you guess what this is?
-
Not Synced
What if I told you there's a place
where the creatures are made of glass?
-
Not Synced
Or that there are lifeforms
that are invisible to us
-
Not Synced
but astronauts see them all the time?
-
Not Synced
These invisible glass creatures
aren't aliens on a faraway exoplanet,
-
Not Synced
they're diatoms:
-
Not Synced
photosynthetic, single-celled algae
responsible for producing oxygen
-
Not Synced
and helping seed clouds
on a planetary scale.
-
Not Synced
And with intricately scultped,
geometric exoskeletons
-
Not Synced
made of --
-
Not Synced
yeah --
-
Not Synced
glass.
-
Not Synced
You can see them in swirls
of ocean-surface colors from space
-
Not Synced
and when they die,
-
Not Synced
their glass houses sink
to the depths of the oceans,
-
Not Synced
taking carbon out of the air
and with them to the grave,
-
Not Synced
accounting for a significant amount
of carbon sequestration in the oceans.
-
Not Synced
We live on an alien planet.
-
Not Synced
There is so much weird life
here on Earth to study
-
Not Synced
and so much of it lives
at the edges of our world,
-
Not Synced
of our sight,
-
Not Synced
and of our understanding.
-
Not Synced
One of those edges is Antarctica.
-
Not Synced
Typically, when we think of Antarctica,
-
Not Synced
we think of a place
that's barren and lifeless ...
-
Not Synced
except for a few penguins.
-
Not Synced
But Antarctica should instead be known
as a polar oasis of life,
-
Not Synced
host to countless creatures
that are utterly fascinating.
-
Not Synced
So why haven't we seen them
on the latest nature documentary?
-
Not Synced
Well, they lurk beneath the snow and ice,
-
Not Synced
virtually invisible to us.
-
Not Synced
They're microbes.
-
Not Synced
Tiny plants and animals living
embedded inside of glaciers,
-
Not Synced
underneath the sea ice
-
Not Synced
and swimming in subglacial ponds.
-
Not Synced
And they're no less charismatic
than any of the megafauna
-
Not Synced
that you're used to seeing
in a nature documentary.
-
Not Synced
How do you compel people
to explore what they can't see?
-
Not Synced
I recently led a five-week
expedition to Antarctica
-
Not Synced
to essentially become a wildlife
filmmaker at the microbial scale.
-
Not Synced
With 185 pounds of gear,
-
Not Synced
I boarded a military aircraft
-
Not Synced
and brought microscopes into the field
-
Not Synced
to film and investigate
these microscopic extremophiles
-
Not Synced
so that we can become more familiar
with a poorly understood ecosystem
-
Not Synced
that we live with here on Earth.
-
Not Synced
To film these invisible
creatures in action
-
Not Synced
I needed to see where they call home.
-
Not Synced
I needed to venture under the ice.
-
Not Synced
Every year, the sea ice nearly doubles
the entire size of Antarctica.
-
Not Synced
To get a glimpse below
the nine-feet-thick ice,
-
Not Synced
I climbed down a long, metal tube
inserted into the sea ice
-
Not Synced
to witness a hidden
ecosystem full of life,
-
Not Synced
hoping suspended between the seafloor
and the illuminated ceiling of ice.
-
Not Synced
Here's what that looked like
from the outside.
-
Not Synced
It was just absolutely magical.
-
Not Synced
Some of the critters I found
were delightful things like sea shrimp
-
Not Synced
and many more beautiful,
geometric diatoms.
-
Not Synced
I then went farther afield
to camp out in the Dry Valleys
-
Not Synced
for a couple of weeks.
-
Not Synced
98 percent of Antarctica
is covered with ice
-
Not Synced
and the Dry Valleys are the largest area
of Antarctica where you can actually see
-
Not Synced
what the continent itself looks like
underneath all of it.
-
Not Synced
I sampled bacteria at Blood Falls,
-
Not Synced
a natural phenomena of a subglacial pond
spurting out iron oxide
-
Not Synced
that was thought to be utterly lifeless
until a little more than a decade ago.
-
Not Synced
And I hiked up a glacier
to drill down into it,
-
Not Synced
revealing countless, hardcore critters
living their best lives
-
Not Synced
while embedded inside layers of ice.
-
Not Synced
Known as cryoconite holes,
-
Not Synced
they form when tiny pieces
of darkly colored dirt
-
Not Synced
get blown onto the glacier
-
Not Synced
and begin to melt down into soupy holes
that then freeze over,
-
Not Synced
preserving hundred of dirt pucks
inside the glacier,
-
Not Synced
like little island universes,
-
Not Synced
each with its own unique ecosystem.
-
Not Synced
Some of the critters I found
you may recognize,
-
Not Synced
like this adorable tardigrade --
-
Not Synced
I absolutely love them,
-
Not Synced
they're like little
gummy bears with claws.
-
Not Synced
Also known as a water bear,
-
Not Synced
they're famous for possessing super powers
-
Not Synced
that allow them to survive
in extreme conditions,
-
Not Synced
including the vacuum of space.
-
Not Synced
But you don't need to travel to space
or even Antarctica to find them.
-
Not Synced
They live in moss all over this planet,
-
Not Synced
from sidewalk cracks to parks.
-
Not Synced
You likely walk by tons of these
invisible animal every day.
-
Not Synced
Others may look familiar,
-
Not Synced
but be stranger still, like nematodes.
-
Not Synced
Not a snake,
-
Not Synced
nor an earth worm,
-
Not Synced
nematodes are a creature all their own.
-
Not Synced
They can regenerate like an earth worm
or crawl like a snake,
-
Not Synced
but they have tiny, dagger-like needles
inside their mouths
-
Not Synced
that some of them use to spearfish
their prey and suck out the insides.
-
Not Synced
For every single human on this planet,
-
Not Synced
there exist 57 billion nematodes
-
Not Synced
And some of the critters
you may not recognize at all
-
Not Synced
but live out equally fascinating lives,
-
Not Synced
such as rotifers with amazing crowns
that turn into Roomba-like mouths;
-
Not Synced
[silias] with digestive systems
so transparent that it's almost TMI,
-
Not Synced
and cyanobacteria that look like party
confetti exploded all over a petri dish.
-
Not Synced
A lot of times what we see
on popular media
-
Not Synced
are [scanning] electron microscope
images of microorganisms
-
Not Synced
looking like scary monsters.
-
Not Synced
Without seeing them move
their lives remain elusive to us
-
Not Synced
despite them living nearly
everywhere we step outside.
-
Not Synced
What's their daily life like?
-
Not Synced
How do they interact
with their environment?
-
Not Synced
If you only ever saw a photo
of a penguin at a zoo,
-
Not Synced
but you never saw one waddle around
and then glide over ice,
-
Not Synced
you wouldn't fully understand penguins.
-
Not Synced
By seeing microcreatures in motion,
-
Not Synced
we gain better insights into the lives
of the otherwise invisible.
-
Not Synced
WIthout documenting the invisible life
in Antarctica and our backyards,
-
Not Synced
we don't understand just how many
creatures we share our world with.
-
Not Synced
And that means we don't yet
have the full picture
-
Not Synced
of our weird and whimsical home planet.
-
Not Synced
Thank you.